Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus for presenting a three-dimensional tomographic image, an image processing method, and a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
In the medical field, a doctor performs diagnosis by using medical images obtained by various types of modalities such as an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) apparatus, ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus, PAT (PhotoAcoustic Tomography) apparatus, and X-ray CT (Computer Tomography) apparatus. Depending on the modality or imaging mode to be used, a target tissue is sometimes depicted as if it had a defect, in spite of the fact that the target tissue has no defect (that is, a pseudo defective portion). Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2009-268741 discloses a method of extracting a pseudo defective portion of a target tissue which occurs when obtaining a medical image, performing interpolation based on information representing the direction of the target tissue, and displaying the resultant image.
In addition, the doctor sometimes performs diagnosis by using medical images obtained by various types of modalities or sometimes performs diagnosis by comparing images obtained by the same modality with different imaging modes, different imaging body postures, different phases, different imaging dates, and the like. In such a case as well, owing to the influence of directivity at the time of imaging, the depicting appearance of the same tissue sometimes differs depending on a target image (one of images to be compared) and a reference image (the other image to be compared). A technique of estimating the depicting appearance of a target image with directivity at the time of imaging based on a reference image and presenting the resultant image is disclosed in W. Wein, A. Khamene, D-A. Clevert, O. Kutter, and N. Navab, “Simulation and fully automatic multimodal registration of medical ultrasound”, Proc. MICCAI' 07, vol. 1, pp. 136-143, 2007.
The method disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2009-268741 does not necessarily provide proper interpolation when a pseudo defective portion in which no target tissue is depicted ranges widely. The method disclosed in W. Wein. et al. does not perform processing based on a target tissue, and hence cannot properly estimate the depicting appearance of the target tissue in a target image.